Charred bodies in Awori area, Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway in Abule Egba, Lagos by fire as a result of pipeline on Tuesday December 26, 2006

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Burnt human bodies being loaded into a truck with shovels at the scene of the explosion

Victims in area hospital beds, Lagos, Nigeria

This year’s Christmas celebration turned out rather too painful for some residents of Lagos State, when fire from a pipeline explosion claimed estimated thousands of people and injured hundreds of others.

Although the Nigerian Red Cross Society and Reuters put the death toll between 500 and 700, residents put the casualties in the thousands.

The victims had largely gone to the leaking pipelines to draw fuel following scarcity of gasoline in Nigeria during the Christmas season.

Fuel scarcity had made movement almost impossible in Nigeria during the Christmas period, therefore news of fuel availability anywhere around Lagos metropolitan area normally attracts huge crowd.

Apparently, news of leaking fuel from oil pipelines was no exception despite the clearly known dangers.

Nigeria is one of the major suppliers of petroleum products to the world, yet thousands of Nigerian citizens are often roasted to death when fuel scarcity and poverty force the population to resort to stealing fuel from the pipelines.

According to news reports, “the high-level syndicates do arrive at the specific pipeline location with sophisticated equipments with which they drilled the pipeline, lift (draw) petroleum products and depart with many tankers numbering between 20 to 40 filled with petrol”.

A tanker load is estimated to fetch between N10million to N20million depending on where the fuel is sold, albeit, in the thriving local and international black market.

More troublesome are recent news reports that top officials of the government, security agencies and government corporations may have been involved in the pipeline vandalization that caused these explosions.

More troublesome also are news reports that a large convoy of heavily armed policemen and the military, sometimes numbering 50 to 100 lead these operations.

More troublesome also are further reports that the syndicate have their people in the NNPC who switch off electronic gadgets that normally monitors the pipeline which allows the syndicate to drill the pipes at the most vulnerable spots.

When the big syndicates leave, it was then that less sophisticated criminals, ordinary people, unemployed youths male and female, poor and hungry neighborhood folks, men, women, adult, teenagers, children, street urchins take over the scene to scoop petrol out of the leaking pipes, while local security details in the area will be readily available extorting/collecting bribes from those scooping the leaking fuel. The crowd is normally huge.

The local participants scoops petrol with open containers such as buckets, cans, tins, jerry-cans, with and without covers and whatever container they have.

When the words normally get out, bigger individual criminals with tankers, including water tankers, vehicles including private and commercial, company vehicles and passenger buses filled with containers, working class motorists from nearby and far places will start trooping in to scoop fuel.

The criminals and street urchins would sell the fuel in the open black market, while the working class motorists and private car owners will keep the fuel in their houses for private use.

Once the word gets out about location of leaking fuel pipeline, both the high and low, big and small in the society throng to the location to scoop fuel.

Due to scarcity of fuel in Nigeria, this is good deal for fuel–starved population. It is, most importantly, a good business for most of the participants. The public, the motorists have no choice than to buy petrol from the black market.

The fire, which quickly spread may have killed both participants in illegal fuel procurement, innocent passersby’s and residents in the neighborhood minding their businesses.

Debunking claims by NNPC (a federal government agency controlling the production and distribution of petroleum in Nigeria) that street urchins were responsible for fuel pipeline vandalization, a petroleum engineer based in Lagos, anonymously said: “there is no way a commoner like area boys would have drilled a high pressured petrol pipeline without getting incinerated doing it on the spot. It takes knowledgeable experts to drill high pressure pipelines; this is certainly an inside job”.

The fact that despite millions of dollars spent on providing helicopters and high-level equipments to monitor pipelines, and vandalization have continued unchecked goes to question NNPC claims that those are the handiwork of common criminals and ordinary citizens.

Despite the fact that pipeline explosion is not new to Nigeria, it is unknown whether the government had put any form of emergency response protocol in place to deal with future occurrence.

The NNPC is one of the government agencies under direct control of President Obasanjo and also one of the agencies adjudged most corrupt in Nigeria today.

This is not only a national tragedy; it is a colossal national shame and disgrace.

This represents total failure of leadership at all levels. The leadership has to be held accountable for this calamity.